Rudolf von Scheliha

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Rudolf von Scheliha

Rudolf von Scheliha (born May 31, 1897 in Zessel , district of Oels , province of Silesia , † December 22, 1942 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German diplomat and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Memorial plaque , Frankfurter Allee 233, in Berlin-Lichtenberg

Until 1933

Rudolf von Scheliha's father was the Prussian officer and landowner Rudolph von Scheliha , his mother was a daughter of the Prussian Finance Minister Johannes von Miquel . His sister, who was four years younger than him, was the classical scholar Renata von Scheliha .

After graduating from high school in 1915, Scheliha volunteered in the First World War and was awarded both Iron Crosses and the Silver Wound Badge for his work.

After the end of the war he began studying law in Breslau ; in May 1919 he moved to the University of Heidelberg , where he joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia in 1919 . There von Scheliha came into contact with pro-republic and anti-totalitarian circles; He was elected to the AStA for the Association of Heidelberg Connections , where he and other Corps students vehemently opposed the anti-Semitic riots on the part of the student body.

Following his exams in 1921, he first became a trainee lawyer at the Court of Appeal , later an employee of the Foreign Office and in the following years took on tasks in the diplomatic missions in Prague , Constantinople (now Istanbul ), Angora (now Ankara ), Katowice (now Katowice) and Warsaw ; In 1927 he was appointed Secretary of the Legation . In the same year he married Marie Louise von Medinger. The two children Sylvia (born 1930) and Elisabeth (born 1934, died 2016 in Adliswil, todesangeboteportal.ch) resulted from the marriage.

1933 to 1942

A few months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, Scheliha became a diplomat member of the NSDAP . From 1932 to 1939 he worked at the German embassy in Warsaw. There he made contacts with Polish aristocrats and intellectuals, some of which he maintained after the attack on Poland began and was thus able to use them for news about Nazi crimes abroad.

From September 1939 Scheliha was appointed head of an “information department” in the Foreign Office , which was supposed to counter foreign press and radio reports about German occupation policy in Poland . This enabled him to check the truthfulness of the reports abroad and to ask Nazi officials about them. In this position he frequently protested against German crimes in Poland at Nazi agencies . He also helped Poles and Jews to flee abroad.

He secretly put together a collection of documents about the atrocities of the Gestapo and in particular the murder of Jews in Poland, which also contained photographs of newly established extermination camps . He showed this dossier in June 1941 to the Polish Countess Klementyna Mankowska , who visited him in Berlin to make these details known to the Polish resistance movement and the Allies.

In the autumn of 1941 Scheliha invited his Polish friend Count Konstantin Bninski to Berlin on the pretext that he should write propaganda for the Foreign Office against Polish resistance. Ulrich Sahm , in his biography published in 1990, considers it likely that Scheliha passed on to Bninski material for a comprehensive documentation of the German occupation crimes on this occasion. This work, completed in January 1942, was written by Polish resistance members under the title The Nazi Culture in Poland , recorded on microfilm and smuggled to Great Britain until 1945 at the high personal risk of those involved . It is considered to be one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the war-time Holocaust that has begun in Eastern Europe.

In February 1942 Scheliha ended his attempts to propose and pass on exiled Poles as helpers for German propaganda in order not to endanger them and themselves further. This spring he traveled to Switzerland several times and passed on information that he had become aware of about " Aktion T4 ", including sermons by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen against the murder of the mentally ill, to the Allies. He also forwarded reports on the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” such as the construction and operation of further extermination camps and Hitler's order to “exterminate” the European Jews.

In the autumn of 1942, German communists in exile who had trained in Moscow attempted to establish direct contact with Scheliha in order to receive important military news from the Foreign Office. The Gestapo had been watching Scheliha for a long time because of his critical attitude towards Nazi politics in Poland and was looking for an opportunity to eliminate him. This came about with the unmasking of various Western European and Berlin resistance groups, which were grouped together by a Gestapo special commission as the “ Red Orchestra” . On October 29, 1942, Heinrich Koenen was arrested in Ilse Stöbe's apartment . With him he had, among other things, a microfilm with proof of a 1937 transfer to a Swiss bank account Schelihas.

On the same day, Scheliha was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with treason as one of the first alleged members of the Red Orchestra. In fact, he had no direct contact with the resistance group around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack , and he was not aware of the connections between Ilse Stöbe and Rudolf Herrnstadt and the Soviet Union . In the indictment, however, he was charged with espionage paid for by the Soviets. Scheliha was tortured during the interrogation. He then confirmed the fabricated allegations in order to save the lives of other contact persons.

Although he revoked his confession of torture during the trial, the Reich Court Martial sentenced Rudolf von Scheliha to death on December 14, 1942 for treason. The files of the proceedings including the judgment have not been found. On December 22, 1942, he was hanged in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison. As one of his last utterances before his death is passed down:

"I am not to blame for what I am charged for, I have not accepted any money, I will die with a pure heart."

His wife Marie Louise was arrested on December 22nd and taken to the judicial prison on Kantstrasse. There she was repeatedly interrogated and threatened and was not released until November 6th. In the last days of the war, she and her daughters fled to Niederstätten in Bavaria via Prague. In the former castle of the princes of Hohenlohe-Jagstberg, the family lived in a cellar and lived mainly on mushrooms, berries and windfalls.

Historical appreciation

In West German historiography, Scheliha was not seen as a resistance fighter until 1986, but as a spy in the Soviet service. The interrogation and Gestapo files continued to be spread uncritically as "sources", to which former Nazi prosecutors such as Manfred Roeder and Alexander Kraell , the former president of the 2nd Senate of the Reich Court Martial , contributed after 1945.

On July 20, 1961, the Foreign Office in Bonn honored eleven of its employees who were executed as resistance fighters with a memorial plaque, including Count Albrecht von Bernstorff , Ulrich von Hassell , Adam von Trott zu Solz and Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg . Rudolf von Scheliha was not mentioned because he was still accused of passing on information to the Soviet Union and this was viewed as "treason".

Only more recent research on the Red Chapel, especially Ulrich Sahm's biography, was able to revise this assessment. As a result, the Cologne Administrative Court ruled in October 1995 that Scheliha had not been sentenced to death for espionage, but in a sham trial for his opposition to National Socialism and overturned the 1942 judgment.

On December 21, 1995, during a ceremony with State Secretary Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz, an additional plaque with the inscription “Rudolf von Scheliha 1897–1942” was attached.

On July 18, 2000, in a ceremony in the new Foreign Office in Berlin, both panels were brought together and the names were listed in the order of the dates of death. Sheliha's name tops the list.

Von-Scheliha-Strasse in Hamburg-Neuallermöhe

In Hamburg-Neuallermöhe-West a street was named after him on May 5, 1997 in memory of Rudolf von Scheliha. There is also a Schelihastraße in Gotha . However, this is named after the chief steward v. Scheliha , who owned a large garden plot in the street on which the Protestant Kreuzkirche stands today.

literature

Web links

Commons : Rudolf von Scheliha  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 4: S. Editors: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, p. 55.
  2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 140 , 1312.
  3. ↑ Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 4: S. Editors: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, p. 56.
  4. ^ The Nazi Culture in Poland . shoa.de
  5. ^ Susanne Kienlechner: The Nazi Culture in Poland. Rudolf von Scheliha and Johann von Wühlisch. Two German diplomats against the National Socialist culture in Poland.
  6. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär : For another Germany. The German resistance against the Nazi state 1933–1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-596-13934-1 , p. 139.
  7. ^ Bernward Dörner : The Germans and the Holocaust. What nobody wanted to know, but everyone could know. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-549-07315-5 , p. 281.
  8. ↑ Frauke Geyken: We did not stand aside - women in resistance against Hitler . Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65902-7 .
  9. ↑ Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 4: S. Editors: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, p. 56.
personal data
SURNAME Scheliha, Rudolf von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat and resistance fighter under National Socialism, member of the Red Orchestra
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Zessel , Province of Silesia
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1942
Place of death Berlin